The Gravity Well Protocol Specification is an April 2026 Assembly-synthesis document defining infrastructure for governed continuity across AI-generated and AI-mediated content. Its central product sentence is “a substrate where content acquires continuity, provenance, and governed reality.”
The protocol is deliberately not framed as another social platform. It is an integration layer that other systems may use. Six primitives define the minimum product: Create produces a traceable object; Reply extends a derivation chain; Trace displays lineage; Review records a governance judgment and reason; Fix anchors an object to an immutable record; and Export moves content with its provenance intact.
Every object carries content hashes, authorship type, a continuity key, timestamps, parent relations, derivation labels, source relations, anchors, current status, and append-only status history. Supporting Agent, Event, and ReviewAction objects separate identity continuity, state change, and governance intervention.
The specification introduces a lifecycle from GENERATED through VERIFIED, FIXED, REVIEWED, and RATIFIED, with lateral states for rejection, quarantine, and deprecation. This status algebra belongs to the Gravity Well design and differs from both the Space Ark ladder and the later Alexanarch registry vocabulary. It should not be silently substituted for either.
Four authority layers are held apart. The protocol validates structure and transition rules. The deploying platform configures community boundaries and access. The community reviews and flags. The archive may provide canonical anchors and deeper provenance resolution. This separation is meant to prevent moderation authority, technical validation, and archival permanence from collapsing into one power.
The body also contains API routes, a deployment stack, cost estimates, an SDK-style integration example, and a commercial positioning section. These are technical and market specifications at a dated stage of the project. The authority wiki should describe them as proposed architecture unless a later implementation record confirms deployment.
Referenced by 50 other entities in the archive. See the full Knowledge Graph for reference paths, or the primary record for the full deposit with reference details.